An International Archive
The abandoned places have always attracted me by their unexplained energetic saturation against the background of emptiness and absence. These are the segments of space that might disappear if human beings arise on the scene. Their life is short and it is a big deal to witness it.
— Ksenia Yurkova, St. Petersburg, Russia
Working over a twelve-month period in Nottinghamshire, England, we have used high-resolution digital and traditional pinhole photography to explore areas at the interface between natural and synthetic landscape.
The edgelands are a kind of wasteland considered unusable, overlooked, undefined and unattractive. These are neglected, often forgotten areas.
Edgelands, the project, starts to explore what landscape means to us. Land is more than physical landscape and environment. It is unique and has symbolic importance. It has value — perhaps a meaning as significant as its physical embodiment. British landscape and its predominantly manufactured presence affects us physically and emotionally and stimulates us intellectually, even spiritually. Edgelands are landscapes that are connected to human activity both historical and contemporary; tracts of land at the crossing point of the rural and urban.
The underlying theme of the work comes from its engagement with basic human issues of our place in the landscape — how and where we belong.
— Nick Dunmur & Paul Harrison, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Shadows / Echoes II presents a myriad of stories and myths; nourished by a desire to convince and to be convinced, I have somewhat naïvely attempted, by the use of photography, to get closer to a system of belief in Iceland, where the existence of elves and fairies are most certainly not considered marginal, depicting tangible landscapes claimed to be inhabited by the hidden creatures.
However forged or displaced, the landscapes and stories draws my attention, rendering an absolute belief in something, creating a longing to make visible the invisible. The material presented denotes a divergence between the represented and the perceived, the generated and the genuine, and the ultimately unknowable.
Fundamentally the work is about the desire to believe; how stories are being construed, and the use of these materials to do exactly so; opting for the prospect of photography establishing a very different relationship to the “real” than predictably assumed.
— Marianne Bjørnmyr, London, United Kingdom
The first time I went there I was seven. It was with my grandfather.
Afterwords, with my friends, by car, hanging out, stopping at old churches and pine woods, talking, smoking, arguing about the next direction to drive. We went there to discover hidden inns, unusual views, fresh smells of mushrooms and mildews. It was long time ago.
I think there is such a place in the memory of each of us. Something particularly meaningful. Maybe, not far from the town we live, a place in the suburb, in countryside, a road across the mountains. A “B” road near Genoa, for example. The route SP 67 runs from Apparizione, a fraction on the borderline of the town of Genoa, to Calcinara, four houses in the inland. Around here, “Dark Nord Wind” is the name given to the North Wind when it carries rain and storms.
I have been driving this road many time, from 2008 to 2010. I took pictures. Looking for what I left behind: bad weather, dark paths, shadows of old friends, blurred memories. I went deeper into the forest, descending paths, looking through trees in the mists. Trying to grab the mystery of a place I only found the uncertainty of a road still to be covered to the end.
“I’m running towards nothing, again and again and again” (Simonetta Roncaglia)
— Roberto Schena, Milan & Genoa, Italy
Schwinden is a photographic collection of dissolving places caused by climate change and human construction. Coastal erosion has dramatic effects on living space and human activity and is mostly caused through the intensive construction of the coastal line and the use of sand for building purpose. The work demonstrates the limits of our belief in the “manageability” of our natural surroundings. Furthermore it reflects on the nature of photography itself, since each picture contains a moment captured and simultaneously lost forever. Schwinden is an ongoing project begun in 2009.
— Anne Lass, Berlin, Germany
I use the everyday phenomena of light as a source material for my unconventional experimentations with 35mm film. For my ongoing Altered Landscapes series I photograph shifting streaks of light and then submit my undeveloped negatives to physical manipulations, like putting them in the laundry machine, soaking them in a lake and opening up the back of the camera to expose the film to light. The resulting imagery reveals surprising colors and lines that are inherent to the quality of film, and yet invisible without the manipulations. These projects are similar to meditation: the goal is to reveal the previously unseen in order to make the new light become a sort of consciousness. The practice of manipulating film is an effort at locating a phenomenological presence that can only be revealed through that physical destruction. The process and result of these alterations is similar to closing the eyes when in front of the sun; unexpected lights, colors, and lines begin to form within the subconscious.
I am fascinated by the way that light moves throughout the day, and how the effort of tracking it affects our understanding of the way the natural world operates. Shifting light can alter our environments, our moods, and our awareness of physical and mental space. By harnessing the ephemeral passing of light, the altered image becomes a unique representation of a singular moment in time, a one-time combination of light, color, and chemical reaction that can never again be duplicated, except through the photograph.
— Jessica Adams, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Guided by the allure of the unexpected and the revisiting of my personal past, I began to make photographs in my home state of Wisconsin in 2005. Coinciding with increasing political attention on Wisconsin, I traversed the entire state several times over the course of five years. The image of Wisconsin being portrayed on the national stage was quite different than the one I had come to know over a life lived within its borders.
These photographs constitute a personal and unique portrayal of the state. They are steeped in unassuming Midwestern solitude, populated by timeless characters, and set in a landscape that is neither dull nor spectacular and always seasonally in flux. While these photographs may live within the stereotypes of the Midwest, they also confound them with a reverent and dignified perspective on the land and people of Wisconsin.
Absorbing wit, humor, melancholy, and irony, the photographs in On Wisconsin seek surprise in the familiar and familiarity in the new. The images transcend the mere documentation of place to become paragraphs unto themselves, countering the instantaneous nature of our era and inviting the viewer to pause.
— Mark Brautigam, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Catskill Mountains began as a seeing exercise. It must happen to everyone at some point, when you cannot see the forest for the trees — in the most literal sense, when you become inured to your surroundings. I’m not sure when it happened, but I have spent the past twenty-five years in the Catskills and I could no longer see the mountains — the very same blue and green landscapes depicted by the Hudson River School. The natural world described by John Burroughs. The mountains and their valleys are still there and I am certain they remain beautiful. I simply wasn’t able to see them in the way I wanted to – or in the way I could remember seeing them.
In an effort to regain my sight, I began with the hills, in the hope that I would see the mountains. Perhaps along the way I would also see a forest and its trees.
— David Barry, Margaretville, New York, USA
My interest in the vast transformation of the American landscape has led me to travel extensively in my car for several months every year. The mural-size photographs that I make inspire awe and wonder over a particular terrain and act as a catalyst to an ethical need to penetrate a grander question about landscape. My process begins with an unmitigated curiosity inspired by research into industry, culture, history, anthropology, geology and ecology. I resist approaching a landscape strictly as an expanse of scenery but view it as an anomaly with an abundance of information to be discovered.
— Victoria Sambunaris, New York City, USA
I grew up in the industrialized northeastern part of the United States, where I still live and work. This environment has had an impact on what I photograph. For more than 20 years the themes of urban architecture and man’s impact on the environment has long challenged me artistically and intellectually. I witness this in urban structures as simple as building façades in a strip mall to the deserted athletic fields of parks and playgrounds. The resulting work, titled Urban Studies, is an interaction of formal and organic elements.
Through my viewfinder I organize these banal yet complex images, first as flat two-dimensional objects and then as a multi-layered space of visual elements. The intent of portraying the desolation and lack of human interaction is intentional, marking a direct consequence of this isolation.
— Aubrey J. Kauffman, West Trenton, New Jersey, USA
